Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Biosecurity Amendment (Traveller Declarations and Other Measures) Bill, and I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1) notes the Government's commitment to a $100 billion agriculture industry; and

(2) condemns the Government for its failure to implement in full the recommendations made by the 2017 independent Intergovernmental Agreement on Biosecurity review panel's report into Australia's biosecurity system".

This amendment goes to the government's performance on biosecurity more generally. Specific to this bill, many if not most Australians will be very familiar with the process of completing an incoming passenger declaration card when they're coming back into the country, whether by air or by sea. I suspect that many Australians take a fairly blase if not cynical approach to this declaration. It's just another burden upon them as they enter the country, usually feeling quite tired after overseas work or travel. But I think everyone in this place would fully understand how important that declaration is in protecting our biosecurity in this country and, in the case of this bill in particular, our farming sector.

Our biosecurity system is probably not one that is well understood by Australians—or anyone listening who might not even know what 'biosecurity' means. Of course, we are talking about what we used to call quarantine, making sure pest and disease doesn't enter our island continent. Being an island continent gives us a very significant advantage in that regard, particularly in the agriculture sector, but it doesn't mean we don't have to continue to work very, very hard to maintain our relatively clean and safe image. Since reports that were done some years ago, we now look at biosecurity quite differently. We think beyond the border a lot, making sure we're dealing with threats to our biosecurity before they come to our shores.

But the passenger declaration is very important. For example, a woodcarving, which might look very innocent to a tourist or someone returning from working overseas, could be carrying beetles, termites or larvae that are not obvious to the human eye. A seafood product could contain something like white spot disease, which nearly wiped out our prawn industry in Queensland not all that long ago. Red meat brought in could be carrying an exotic disease that would pose a big threat to our red meat sector. A plant, for example, could be carrying an aphid, and people would not be aware of that.

So it is very important that people fill out these declaration cards honestly. Sadly, that is not always the case—again, not because people are being deliberately sinister in most cases but because they think that whatever they're carrying is surely not a big issue. It looks pretty safe to them and they prefer not to declare it because, as we all know, once you declare a good you might spend a little bit more time getting through the regulatory and inspection process than you would if you did not declare it. So, the objective of this bill is to increase penalties to raise awareness and hopefully make people more reluctant to make a false declaration on that card. I won't go through the numbers on the penalty increases—the minister has done that—but they are very substantial and hopefully they will raise community awareness of the threats and also make people more likely to make a true declaration.

We support that approach. Biosecurity is of course a shared responsibility between the Commonwealth and the states, and it is a very important measure on the part of the Commonwealth. I am a little bit concerned about whether the government has extended additional training to biosecurity officers, who will have the difficult job of imposing higher on-the-spot fines in an airport, for example. That is something that is not easy to handle, if you've got an energetic and aggressive incoming passenger who is not happy about that fine. We want to make sure this job is done properly and accurately and we want to make sure our workforce has the appropriate training and is ready to deal with what might be some difficult situations.

I think there are a few things about biosecurity that we can all agree on in this place. I've mentioned one—shared responsibility with the states—but there should also be shared responsibility with industry and of course with the broader community, which has a big role to play, and this is the main point of this bill. We can also agree that we must take that pre-border approach, which I mentioned earlier, and we must all agree that the system must be risk based. In other words, we cannot hope to have a zero-risk approach to quarantine. That would be impossible, even for an island continent like Australia. It needs to be risk based. And the initiatives we take in dealing with the level of risk apparent have to be cost-effective and of course have to be science based.

I think we can all agree that it is the responsibility of all of us to make sure our biosecurity system is an effective one. Because it's a Commonwealth-state responsibility, we now have a thing called an Intergovernmental agreement on biosecurity to ensure that the Commonwealth and the states are going in the same direction and working together to get the job done. We do have an intergovernmental agreement, and it's an agreement that does come under review every five years. That is a good thing, because the situation both here and abroad is changing on a regular basis and, of course, threats change. We need to have a constant review to see that both the Commonwealth and the states are up to the mark and they're working as cooperatively and effectively as is possible.

We had one of those reviews headed by an independent panel, chaired by Wendy Craik. It was a very substantial review, and I think a good review, that provided a good explanation of both the system, its shortfalls, and where we can do better. Unfortunately, that review has, in part, been gathering dust. Its recommendations were significant. Many of them, the Commonwealth can say, go to the responsibility of the states or at least joint efforts, but at least 10 of them are solely the responsibility of the Commonwealth. People will now be asking how many. I suggest it's about 10. Then people will be asking how many of those 10 recommendations of the Craik review have been embraced and implemented by this government. I can report it's four. In three years, of those 10 recommendations from the Craik review—that go to the heart of the Commonwealth's responsibility—only four have been responded to.

To give some examples, they are things like asking the government to assign lead responsibility for driving and coordinating implementation of the National environment and community biosecurity research, development and extension strategy 2016 to 2019. We're told that work is ongoing, accelerating our national system of innovation. It flows to talk about how the government should do that—it's quite lengthy—ongoing:

The Australian Government should require public reporting of all Commonwealth funded biosecurity R&I investments …

ongoing.

The Risk Return Resource Allocation model should be extended to include all jurisdictions and their investments …

et cetera ongoing.

Funding for the national biosecurity system should be increased by …

There are a number of dot points demonstrating how that should be increased.

Interestingly, this is one that was the focus of some media attention, because the recommendation was that a $10 per 20-foot equivalent unit and a levy of $5 on incoming sea and air containers should be implemented, to raise the funds needed, to give the system the resources necessary to give us confidence in our biosecurity system. That levy has never been embraced and implemented. The government had a couple of goes at it and, embarrassingly, was sent packing by industry—mainly because the government had, clearly, turned it into a revenue-raising exercise rather than a package designed to bolster our biosecurity system.

In all those years the government kicked it down the road, beyond the 2019 election, declaring it all too hard and then, post election, it just gave up the ghost. It says that it's funding the same initiatives it had identified, that would be funded under the levy. We're yet to determine that with any great certainty. It's for the government to demonstrate to industry it's done just that. There's not much point in doing a comprehensive review of the IGAB, the intergovernmental agreement, if you're not going to pursue the recommendations. We should have ongoing reviews of the system, but we have those reviews. We need to pursue them.

I suspect it's reasonable to say that the work of an agriculture minister is dominated by biosecurity. In the short time I was in that position, I would assess that 60 per cent of my work was taken by biosecurity issues. Obviously, they're very critical. Australia's reputation on global markets is, in very large part, based on our reputation as a provider of clean, green, safe food, and we can't maintain that reputation if we don't ensure to the rest of the world that we are clean, green and safe. In any case, our yields would become very much under threat if pests and disease got into our country and wiped out our product here. Even one-tenth of a crop or stock would make a huge difference to our agricultural sector, but we've seen examples in other countries where whole industries have basically been wiped out because of the incursion of pests and disease.

COVID-19 has, or should have, heightened our awareness about the importance of a very sound biosecurity system, because we've seen the possibility of having exports of inputs cut, whether they're inputs for production or finished goods coming into this country, which highlights our awareness about the need to be self-sufficient as we can. We often say, rightly or wrongly, that we can never have a food security issue in Australia, because we export two-thirds of everything we produce. In other words, as a country of 25 million people, we feed about 70 to 75 million people in total. While that seems to be common sense, one-third of nothing is nothing, so, if we were to have a problem which caused us to be denied our local production and if we weren't able to import significant quantities of food then we could have a very, very significant food security issue.

COVID has also reminded us about the risk of having our ways of communications blocked and what that would mean for our fuel security—something that's very critical to our farmers—and our medicines, not just for human beings but for stock. We are very heavily dependent on the importation of animal medicines. The weather is changing in most challenging ways, and that should raise our awareness of the extent to which we are reliant on imported product.

Biosecurity is very, very important. And, on the issue of chemicals, moving away from animal medicines, it is very true that we are heavily dependent on the import of product, such as the chemicals that our farmers so desperately need, particularly from China. In fact, we're now at risk of losing the last manufacturer of the critical ingredient necessary for many of the chemical products our farmers rely upon. That means that soon, if nothing changes, we'll be 100 per cent dependent on that active ingredient, which should be a warning sign to us all.

Just before I rose to my feet, the various ministers were introducing bills relevant to the budget last night. I haven't had an opportunity, having looked at the macro of the budget and what's happening in my own electorate, to have a deep look at what the government has said about the agricultural sector. I will certainly do that throughout the course of the day, and I will do so with great attention to detail. I think what's missing still from the government in agriculture is an overarching narrative and the strategic guidance necessary to demonstrate to the sector that the government has a plan for the sector and has the will to provide the guidance to ensure that the sector does hit that $100 billion farm gate value that the government talks about so often. I'd like to think $100 billion is still achievable, but it's going to be more difficult now with the impact of COVID—that is, both the impact already and the impact that is going to flow over a number of years. It's okay for the National Farmers Federation to set the $100 billion, and we've been very supportive of that. It's not so necessary for them to give the detailed road map to $100 billion, but it is necessary for the government, if it's going to support the $100 billion, to provide that policy guidance, and it has not done so.

We were promised back in 2013, seven years ago, that the government would produce a white paper to give us that strategic guidance. I had a good chat with the member for New England at the time, as he was the agricultural minister. I basically begged him to use, as a foundation, the former Labor government's National Food Plan and further build upon that to provide the guidance the sector needs and is looking for. Unfortunately, as I've said in this place many times before, the 2015 white paper was a failure. It was more a collection of ideas, thought bubbles and failed projects than a document providing the strategic guidance that the sector needs to get to that $100 billion.

I heard the current minister make a speech at a CropLife breakfast this morning. I thought I was listening to Barnaby Joyce seven years ago. Nothing changes. There were plenty of cliches. It was short on policy, short on ideas and certainly short on guidance.

The agriculture sector in Australia is not without challenges. We have very limited natural resources—soil and water. We're the driest inhabited continent in the world. Our good soil resources are limited to a relatively small proportion of our continent. As I said earlier, our climate is changing in challenging ways, putting further pressure on those natural resources. Historically we have overproduced on much of our quality land.

Of course, we are short on capital resources, which is why we have been so heavily dependent on foreign capital over all of our lifetime. Traditionally it came from places like Canada, the UK and New Zealand, but increasingly it's now from Asian markets, including China. We in this parliament need to have a real think about the extent to which we facilitate China's investment, because it will be critical to the success of securing that $100 billion.

Minister Taylor was one of the key authors of a report that said that to be successful mid-century we'll need about $600 billion of capital investment in agriculture related infrastructure in this country. We will not get there if we don't secure more community support, have a better understanding and do more to facilitate foreign investment.

Of course we are short on human resources. This has been dramatically highlighted by COVID-19. We have an agriculture sector that is heavily reliant on foreign labour—up to 50,000 foreign workers every year. That's not new; that has been a growing problem over a decade or more. We have to ask ourselves whether that's a healthy proposition to be perpetuating.

We need a short-term solution. The government promised an ag visa and then unpromised an ag visa. It then promised an ag visa and unpromised it again. Since then we've seen nothing of any great merit that addresses the problem in the short to medium term. We also need a long-term plan to reduce that reliance. COVID-19 has demonstrated to us how serious it is for the sector when the supply of foreign labour is cut off. That is not a sustainable proposition.

We have a sector in which 80 per cent of the production comes from 20 per cent of the firms. Productivity has been flatlining for at least a decade. Profitability is, on average, low. According to the ABS, the majority aren't really making a profit. We have limited capital resources, limited human resources, limited natural resources, the climate moving against us and COVID-19 still hanging around. Hopefully, this is the last serious virus we see in a long time. Yet at breakfast this morning the minister said: 'Everything is okay. We're on track to reach $100 billion by 2030.' I beg to differ, given the current structure of the sector and the trajectory it is on at the moment.

This is all despite the best efforts of our growers and producers. There's no criticism of them. They're working within the system that the government is prepared to accept as being good enough. Of course we've had barley producers and others impacted by the decisions of the government of China. From the government there has been no real response that is credible and is likely to have a great impact on that situation. It's a structure and a situation normal that can't be left alone if the government is to have any hope of putting the sector on that $100 billion trajectory. Critical to that will be research and development, and innovation and extension. It's something this government's been talking about for seven years but has done nothing about.

We went to the last election making very clear that we are very proud of the 30-year-old research and development corporation structure that a Labor government put in place under John Kerin. But we also made the point repeatedly that it is a 30-year-old structure that is not fit for purpose in the 21st century and is not delivering the efficient outcomes that our agriculture sector needs right now. We promised a significant redesign of that system to rid us of the top-heavy situation we have in our RDCs, to get more cross-sectoral work going, to stop the siloing and to get people more focused on extension—in other words, to get the innovation inside the farm gate. After a little while, Minister Littleproud decided he might start agreeing with that proposition, and, particularly after the election, started making noises to that effect. But, in fact, pre the election, the minister decided—

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